UC Davis

In recent years, opioids have become a household name as America has faced down an unprecedented wave of overdose death. The fallout of the emergent public health crisis known as “the opioid epidemic” has a storied past stretching well into the last century. Despite a long history of human interest and scientific study of opioid drugs, the current state of biological opioid research has little to offer in service to reducing the scope of this ongoing tragedy. The intent of this work is to enhance the perspective of the fields of opioid pharmacology and neuroscience, both by encouraging routes of investigation which break from tradition, and casting sharper focus on studies with high relevance to real world scenarios. We present data from our own studies which employ novel strategies to examine behavioral and neural signaling changes that arise with acute and chronic opioid exposure. Additionally, we conduct extensive review and analysis of the domains of the opioid literature that inspired these studies, prioritizing the resolution of key controversies and illuminating scholarly gaps that necessitate further inquiry.